Indian historiography has long been dominated by an elite-centred narrative that chronicles the nation through the actions of colonial administrators and nationalist leaders. Ranajit Guha’s pioneering Subaltern Studies intervened in this tradition by insisting that “parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed another domain of Indian politics”, a domain whose principal actors were peasants, workers, and other non-elite groups. He called this the “autonomous domain” of subaltern politics, arguing that it neither originated in elite discourse nor depended on it. By foregrounding the “politics of the people,” Guha challenged the elitist historiography that had rendered subaltern groups voiceless. His work demonstrated that subaltern classes not only suffered oppression but also possessed “the wherewithal to resist the colonial and post-colonial state,” and that historians must study “the social and political processes by which such resistance is crafted”. This article explores Guha’s core contributions, his critique of elitist archives and his emphasis on subaltern agency, and situates them within broader decolonial theories of knowledge. We first review how Subaltern Studies scholars (e.g. Spivak, Chatterjee, Chakrabarty) have built on and critiqued Guha. We then outline theoretical frameworks of coloniality and epistemology (drawing on thinkers like Mignolo, Quijano, Santos) that resonate with Guha’s project. Finally, we analyse how Guha’s insights remain vital for understanding contemporary South Asian struggles from caste mobilisations to indigenous rights and media silencing, all of which demand alternative historiographies beyond the colonial archive.
Literature Review
Subaltern Studies emerged in the early 1980s as a collective effort to recover the forgotten voices of South Asian history. As Guha declared in the introduction to the first volume (1982), historians must “insert the politics of the people” into Indian historiography. The Subaltern Studies group (including scholars like Shahid Amin, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Spivak) drew inspiration from Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern peasants and workers excluded from Marx’s industrial subject to formulate a history “from below.” As one account notes, the group sought to “uncover the histories of groups that went largely shunted to the margins or undocumented altogether” and to “privilege the agency of the underclass within the networks of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism”. In doing so, they explicitly aimed to “dismantle elitist historiography,” rectifying the “elitist bias” of both colonialist and nationalist accounts.
Chakrabarty observes that Subaltern Studies arose from “anti-colonial” rather than strictly “postcolonial” concerns, with Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (1983) being a foundational text. Guha’s work insisted on separating “capital and power” as distinct forces shaping Indian subordination, in contrast to European Marxists who conflated them. Crucially, he refused to portray peasant consciousness as “pre-modern” or “anachronistic,” arguing instead that rural subaltern political culture was contemporaneous with colonialism and an active force in its own right. This rejection of teleological assumptions about “progress”, the idea that peasants would automatically ‘modernise’ into national politics, was a key innovation of the Subaltern project.
Other scholars expanded and critiqued these ideas. Spivak’s famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) cast a critical eye on the Subaltern Studies collective, arguing that subaltern subjectivity is deeply entangled with colonial structures and often silenced in dominant discourses. Along with colleagues like O’Hanlon, she contended that the early Subaltern Studies volumes had insufficiently addressed gender, noting that even women of high status (like the Rani of Sirmur) “were rarely traceable in the colonial narrative”. Chatterjee’s work (e.g. The Nation and Its Fragments and The Politics of the Governed) similarly probed the relationships between elite and subaltern politics, highlighting “the fragment” local, popular forms of belonging that persist alongside official nationalist projects. In retrospect, Chakrabarty has remarked that the Subaltern Studies' aim was “to produce historical analyses in which the subaltern groups were viewed as the subjects of history” rather than as passive objects. He later suggested that rather than force the subaltern into the nation-state narrative, historians might heed Gramsci’s insight that subaltern history is “fragmentary and episodic,” requiring a reading that makes space for its discontinuities.
Despite these debates, a consensus emerged that Subaltern Studies profoundly altered the field by insisting on subjecthood and agency for marginalised people. As one survey notes, the collective “seeks to give the subaltern autonomy as the voice that facilitated political action despite imperial dominance”. This school of thought has been credited with introducing concepts like “Indian middle classes were hegemonic, but subaltern classes had independent struggles” and with emphasising grassroots consciousness. Critics from within and outside South Asia raised issues of binary thinking or romanticisation, but even detractors acknowledge that Subaltern Studies yielded important insights in highlighting those “submerged” histories. In sum, the literature establishes Guha as the founding voice of a major revisionist historiography that decentered elites and prioritised the voices of peasants, tribal peoples, workers, and other “subalterns” in colonial India (and, by extension, in postcolonial South Asia).
Theoretical Framework
To fully appreciate Guha’s intervention, we situate it alongside decolonial theory, a body of thought (notably associated with Latin American scholars) that exposes the enduring “coloniality” of modern power. Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power highlights how colonial social hierarchies (especially racial and epistemic orders) persist after formal decolonisation. Quijano argues that Europe’s hegemony created “control of authority and subjectivity and knowledge” under Eurocentric categories. In this frame, knowledge production itself is “colonialized”: colonial subjects were denied authorship of valid knowledge, and Western epistemologies became the universal standard. Decolonial thinkers thus call for an “epistemic disobedience” to these legacies. Walter Mignolo, for example, urges scholars to delink from the “web of imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power”. He proposes that a decolonial option involves not only critiquing Western epistemic dominance but actively making room for “bodies and regions in need of guidance” to define their own knowledge agendas. Similarly, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South envisions a “cognitive justice” wherein subaltern epistemologies born of struggle against colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism are recognised alongside dominant ones. Santos famously asserts that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice” (i.e. one cannot hope for fairness in society if the world’s knowledge systems remain hierarchical).
Guha’s approach, though developed independently of this Latin American discourse, dovetails with these themes. He treated the colonial archive and nationalist historiography as epistemic systems, privileging elite voices. For example, Guha noted that colonial and nationalist historians wrote “a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite”, whereas the real material of subaltern struggle was obscured. By mining vernacular documents, folklore, and peasant accounts, Guha and his colleagues effectively engaged in decolonial historiography: they sought alternative epistemologies that could recover silenced agency. Indeed, the Subaltern Studies collective argued that archives by definition “privilege the elite and ruling class and completely occlude the illiterate,” necessitating corrective methods. In this sense, Subaltern Studies anticipated key decolonial claims: that the colonial archive is incomplete and that we must listen to other sources and logics to reframe history.
Thus, our framework brings together subaltern historiography and decolonial theory. Guha’s insistence on subaltern agency aligns with Mignolo’s “body-politics of knowledge” and the call to value non-Western knowledges. Both Guha and decolonialists stress that power shapes archives: whether it is the British Raj’s official records or Eurocentric social theory, their authority must be questioned. By reading Guha alongside thinkers like Mignolo and Santos, we see a common project: to unsettle hegemonic narratives and recognise marginalised peoples as active knowledge-producers and historical subjects.
Analysis and Discussion
Guha’s subaltern agency. Ranajit Guha’s most celebrated work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), exemplifies the Subaltern Studies method. He showed that British sources and nationalist writings about rural rebellions were deeply biased not only by the colonial “counter-insurgency” mindset, but also by nationalist romanticism. As one summary notes, Guha “marked not only the bias of the historiography and archive of colonial India’s government documents, but also the bias of the folklore, which has traditionally been touted by nationalist groups as authentic.” In other words, whether by colonial admin or by Brahminical nationalists, peasant voices were filtered through an upper-class lens. Guha’s intervention was to piece together the “mounting everyday actions that are silenced in favor of the larger event.” He traced how peasant communities under remembered leaders like Birsa Munda and Rani Gaidinliu resisted landlord and colonial oppression on their own terms. By recovering these stories, Guha “move to dispel the notion that Indian colonial subjects were powerless during the colonial rule”.
The key lesson was that subalterns had agency: they formed “subaltern consciousness” that drove self-generated mass movements. This echoes Gramsci’s idea that subaltern groups have their own “ways of subordinating,” and it anticipates later scholarship on everyday resistance. Guha argued that these struggles created an “autonomous domain” of politics, rooted in pre-colonial communities and traditions, but very much alive under British rule. In sum, Guha showed that the colonial archive’s silence about subaltern insurrections did not mean such insurrections did not exist; they simply required a different research lens to find.
Limits of the colonial archive. Subaltern Studies famously critiqued the colonial archive as a site of epistemic violence. Archival documents were produced by officials who saw Indians as objects of governance, not participants in history. This archive is incomplete: “since archival documents necessarily privilege the elite and ruling class and completely occlude the illiterate,” historians must probe what is left out. Following Spivak, many subalternists caution that an archive of elite authors may even misrepresent subalterns. Spivak’s example of the Rani of Sirmur illustrates this: despite being a ruler, she “was rarely traceable in the colonial narrative”. For subaltern classes (far less literate than a queen), the archival “silence” is even more complete. Guha’s methodology, like an anthropologist’s careful interviewing or examination of peasant folklore, aimed to fill these silences.
The archive’s limits also mean we need alternative epistemologies. Chakrabarty later observed that 20th-century historians often treated peasant groups as “pre-political” on a ladder toward modernity. In contrast, Subaltern Studies insisted peasants had a political culture of their own. Their beliefs and rituals were dynamic, providing an “intellectual” base for rebellion. This insight suggests the historian must learn the subalterns’ own categories. Such pluralistic knowing aligns with decolonial calls for recognising non-Western rationalities. Guha’s caution against teleology, the assumption that history naturally progresses toward liberal modernity, parallels Mignolo’s critique of “the rhetoric of modernity” and Santos’ notion that knowledge is situated in social struggles.
Connecting to decolonial theory. Guha himself engaged with global subalternity. In the 1990s, he dialogued with Latin American scholars about “coloniality and subalternity.” While Subaltern Studies arose in South Asia, decolonial theorists have pointed to its convergence with their own project. Walter Mignolo explicitly linked subaltern studies to the broader “modernity/coloniality/decoloniality” framework. For Mignolo, Guha’s work exemplified “delinking”, stepping outside the Eurocentric archive to valorise local resistance narratives. In The Politics of the Governed, Partha Chatterjee similarly argued that subaltern politics constitute a sphere (“political society”) with its own institutions and meanings. Both Guha and Chatterjee anticipated debates on “epistemic decolonisation”, the idea that knowledge can and should be disobeyed and remade.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ideas about “ecologies of knowledges” resonate here: just as Santos urges us to create space for “submerged knowledges” from the global South, Guha created space in history for India’s submerged people. Santos’s conviction that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice” speaks to Guha’s political message: modern democracy in South Asia will remain incomplete unless it attends to subaltern traditions. In practical terms, Guha’s work inspires a decolonial politics of history that empowers marginalised groups to narrate their own past.
Relevance for Contemporary South Asia. Guha’s historiographical insights continue to shed light on current issues in South Asia. Caste marginalisation remains pervasive, and Dalit and Bahujan movements draw on subaltern consciousness to challenge entrenched hierarchies. For example, Dalit activists in Gujarat in the 2010s mobilised mass demonstrations (such as the Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch’s 2016-2017 marches) that did not fit elite narratives. Anthropologist Dyotona Banerjee notes that this movement leveraged social media to construct a subaltern identity online, giving voice to youth whose concerns are ignored by mainstream media. As one Dalit activist remarked, his Facebook posts “tell the story of the movement,” allowing the subaltern self to “become visible” in public discourse. This digital activism echoes Guha’s call to recover everyday forms of dissent. Even when large protests are suppressed, the cumulative network of grassroots organisers, writers, and online communities embodies the “politics of the people” that Subaltern Studies valorised.
Indigenous (Adivasi) resistance is another arena where Guha’s legacy matters. Historical subaltern leaders like Birsa Munda inspired 19th-century rebellions; today’s Adivasi movements against mining and land grab invoke their memory. These struggles often unfold in marginal spaces and use local cosmologies, making them hard to trace in official records, just as Guha found peasant revolt lost in colonial archives. Recognising Adivasi agency thus requires listening to oral testimonies, folk songs, and local understandings of justice. Guha’s approach suggests that contemporary historians and activists pay attention to nonstate narratives: for instance, village council accounts of protest or testimonies recorded by NGOs. Such sources reveal that indigenous communities are not merely passive victims but active claimants of rights, resonating with Guha’s emphasis on autonomous subaltern domains.
The theme of political silencing is also pertinent. Just as British authorities once labelled subaltern dissent as “insurgency,” today’s regimes often criminalise dissent (through sedition laws, internet shutdowns, etc.). Mainstream histories usually paint protests as law-and-order issues rather than legitimate subaltern expression. A Guha-influenced perspective would encourage us to question whose narrative is “legitimate history.” We should ask: what are the “politics of the people” behind contemporary agitations (for example, student movements, farmer protests, or indigenous blockades), and how do official archives ignore them? Subaltern Studies teaches that historians must read “against the grain” of the dominant archive. In the present day, this might mean amplifying the words of marginalised bloggers, trade union newsletters, folk theatre, or street graffiti, all sites where the subaltern “speak” in hidden ways. In this way, Guha’s insistence on agency reminds us that even apparently silent communities can be politically active in subtle ways.
Figure: Indian medical and nursing students (white coats) protesting against changes to affirmative-action (reservation) policies in Delhi, 2006. Such popular demonstrations – involving professionals and subaltern groups alike – underscore ongoing contests over caste and class in postcolonial India. Contemporary examples illustrate this dynamic: even established middle-class professionals may identify with subaltern causes, while Dalit and tribal activists continue grassroots movements. The Subaltern Studies lens urges us to see these actors as political subjects, not as passive recipients of “development.” Historical agency thus remains crucial for understanding South Asia today.
Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies fundamentally reoriented South Asian historiography by insisting that the masses are not mute objects of history but active subjects shaping their own destiny. He showed that the colonial archive and its nationalist heirs systematically excluded subaltern voices, necessitating alternative epistemologies. Guha’s idea of an “autonomous domain” of subaltern politics challenged historians to recover that domain through counterarchival methods. Decades on, this approach aligns closely with decolonial thought: both Guha and thinkers like Mignolo and Santos call for delinking from Eurocentric knowledge and affirming local, embodied knowledges.
In the 21st century, Guha’s legacy endures. Whether analysing Dalit campaigns on social media, Adivasi resistance to resource extraction, or any struggle of the marginalised, his historiography reminds us to “listen to history from below.” It teaches that democracy in South Asia gains strength when we acknowledge its subaltern roots (as Guha emphasised by naming Titu, Kanhu, Birsa, and other figures). By bringing the subaltern into view, scholars can produce a more complete, decolonised history. As Santos argues, global social justice cannot be achieved without “cognitive justice”, without making space for subaltern ways of knowing. Guha’s work is a South Asian embodiment of this principle. In studying Guha alongside decolonial theorists, we reimagine history itself as a terrain of liberation, where colonial silences are broken, and the agency of the oppressed is finally heard.